The anxious impatience of our politicians

What explains this odd psychological trait, and its overrepresentation among politicians?

That anxiety breeds restlessness seems straightforward enough. An anxious person needs to busy himself to run away from the anxiety. They have an extra helping of the universal human need for what the French mystic Blaise Pascal called divertissement, the need to distract oneself from one’s mortality. “All of man’s misery comes from his incapacity to sit alone in an empty quiet room,” Pascal once wrote.

Anxiety also breeds the need to be liked, the need for praise and validation, the need for a pedestal. Politics provides the best fix for an anxious, attention-craving, validation-seeking person. Cameron, Clinton, Sarkozy, Chirac, and Rubio have spent their entire adult lives in politics, and were drawn to it from early adulthood.

While anxiety can be self-destructive, it can also be a political asset. Through some strange alchemy, a need to be liked can be translated into a powerful form of interpersonal charisma.